Why Medical Case Reports?

Medicine is built up of single cases. Individual patients—single cases—are the essence of what medicine deals with. Every patient is important, and every case can be a lesson. Clinician, researcher, and epidemiologist Alvan Feinstein said, “In caring for patients, clinicians constantly perform experiments. During a single week of active practice, a busy clinician conducts more experiments than most of his laboratory colleagues do in a year.”(1) Medicine stretches between the intertwined poles of being developed in the laboratories of the pharmaceutical industry and in the clinical practice of the “clinical champions”—the innovative clinician, therapist, nurse, or midwife. While the laboratory testing route (pharmacology, quality assessment, phase I-IV trials) is well established, what about the significant clinical observations? How can they be presented scientifically?